I'm pretty much a WP-idiot so I was trying very hard to follow your instructions above. I was able to identify and remember my categories so I actually managed to do part 2 of your instructions - i.e. I managed to go into my admin section and renamed all the category names correctly. However, when I went to my site and clicked on any category, the link leads to nowhere. I guess it's 'cos I skipped your first step above. However, I'm unable to find the phpMyAdmin. Could you direct me where to find it?

Hi, I installed phpMyAdmin and did as instructed above. While my blog looks ok, when I click on the individual categories, I get the error msg:--------------Redirect Loop

Firefox has detected that the server is redirecting the request for this address in a way that will never complete.

The browser has stopped trying to retrieve the requested item. The site is redirecting the request in a way that will never complete.

* Have you disabled or blocked cookies required by this site? * NOTE: If accepting the site's cookies does not resolve the problem, it is likely a server configuration issue and not your computer.--------------

Thanks for your help with this problem. I had put off upgrading Wordpress from an initial 2.2.2 installation because I was concerned that the procedure would break something.

I had the same Categories issue that you did.

Your procedure worked. However, I did find an easier way to deal with the second step. I found that the entries for the Category Name and Slug could be edited directly via the wp_terms table just as you did for the Description in the wp_term_taxonomy table. I just matched the ID's using the Descriptions as a guide. My site seems to be back in business.

I would like to add to the chorus of people who have thanked you for your instructions. They worked for me too. Like you, I upgraded from 2.2.3 to 2.6.

I'm guessing that those of us who had problems may have all had our Permalink settings configured to "Day and name." Mine were. A friend of mine had advised me to change this back to "Default" before upgrading, but I didn't see her message until after I'd performed the upgrade. Had I seen it, I think this may have been avoided. I did have all my few plug-ins disabled prior to upgrading.

I'd also like to second the footnote that Mark added above about editing the wp_terms table to add the Name and Slug. That was faster and easier. After you open a database table in phpMyAdmin, you have to remember to click the "Browse" tab (along the top) in order to access the area that you need to edit.

Remember to backup your database before you try this! I also took a backup afterward.

As it turns out, there's a problem in the WP 2.3 upgrade script (or a file named like that), where they forgot to map the names of the categories, causing them to be lost

This has been fixed in their codebase now, so 2.6.1 shouldn't have that problem anymore.

Anyway, once I fixed my blog, I didn't really care anymore ;)

Also, I'm guessing you could probably fix it all without opening phpMyAdmin at all, just by guessing ID's in your admin section :) But hey, I took the screenshots by that time and it worked, quick hack :p

David said, "This has been fixed in their codebase now, so 2.6.1 shouldnâ€™t have that problem anymore."

I've used your instructions *thank you so much* to fix one blog that this happened to, and am going to wait to try it on any of my (many) others. Is there any way we can access the "fix" in the codebase, or any idea when the 2.6.1 release is due out?

Thanks for the great write up. I was just upgrading to the latest WP and got the same problem. I pretty much figured it out but I wanted to check if anyone else had this issue, that's when I found your site.

I'd like to add something here because I did encounter another related problem and want to share the solution.

Basically, when I used the http://your-site/wp-admin/categories.php?action=edit&amp;cat_ID=1link for one of my categories, I got the mysterious error 'Category not updated'. It turns out that the WP upgrade added other terms to the taxonomy (taken from the website meta-tags, I think) and one of them had the same name as the category that could not be updated.

To fix this, enter back into phpMyAdmin and select the wp-terms table on the left sidebar. Click on Browse which is at the top of the page. This shows you the table with all terms. To allow upgrading the duplicate category, simply click on the pencil icon next to the duplicate term and rename it. Click go. Then you can go back and edit the category as per the instructions above.

As an extension to this you do not need to use the category edit link. Instead simply edit the wp-terms table with your category data.

THANK YOU SO MUCH for taking the time to write this up. You didn't have to, but you did. And you saved me a couple dozen hours of manually adding categories to over 500 posts! I'm guessing that you've saved the collective wordpress upgrading community weeks worth of time.

I wrote the high-level solution on my blog, and linked back with much love to your blog for the details. http://www.butterhomes.com/blog/index.php/wordpress-categories-are-back/

I have the same problem as Uptown Gal in the very first comment: I can't find "phpMyAdmin". I've looked in the site structure using cpanel as well as navigating around the WP-admin with no luck. Nor would "http:www.signaturestrategies.com/wp-admin/categories.php?action=edit&amp;cat_ID+1" allow me to enter a category name. It told me I already had that name in that spot.. Any ideas for this tech-handicapped bumbler?

I can find phpMyadmin and open up the current tables, but I don't know how to look at my database backup which resides on my hard drive as a .sql file. When I tried importing it into phpMyadmin, it ran some processes, but I didn't see any of the old tables. Help please?

Bless You David!!!! Like so many others have said, you are my hero today. And the same goes for Gerardo as well, since he provided the SQL queries I needed (and instructions) to update automatically my 80+ categories....that would have been horrible to do manually!!!

Thank you David for providing the solution to fix the missing categories in WP 2.6. I could fix the problems in one of my blogs. I however have many blogs to upgrade and I think it is better to wait till WordPress comes up with 2.6.1 to fix this problem.

@106 concerning the slug and name of the blogroll: I ended up changing the "Taxonomy" for the blogroll category to "category" from "link_category" in phpMyAdmin long enough to add a name and slug to the blogroll in the WordPress admin area as David outlines above. Then I just went back into phpMyAdmin and changed the blogroll's category "Taxonomy" back to "link_category". It worked! Your link is a lot better though.

Thanks mate, your explanation saved our site! Every stinkin' time I upgrade WordPress something like this ends up happening, but thank goodness for the helpful WP community. The solutions that the users discover always end up patching up the poor coding of the new builds. Thanks again!

Hi David! I recently upgraded to WP2.6 coming from an old version and I had the same problem you described above with regards to missing all of the categories. After bumping into this blog post, I went ahead and tried to follow your instructions and managed successfully to add the category names, slugs and descriptions, both in wp_terms &amp; wp_term_taxonomy (As suggested by one of your readers in the comments above), but when going into the admin panel I found out that it didn't show *any* categories at all. Just shows is blank.I have then tried to follow your set of instructions around "http://mysite.com/wp-admin/categories.php?action=edit&amp;cat_ID=1" and it apparently creates a new category because I tried it out with one entry where I knew I had 7 blog posts and after saving the changes it showed the category name and everything else, but no link to the rest of the posts.

Am I missing something in here while following your steps? Do you know what could possibly be wrong what the steps I am following? Any help or suggestions you may have would be very appreciated!

Wooohooo! And we are back in business! I took another look into the set of instructions and repeated the process and this time around, go figure, it worked out like a charm! Wonderful stuff, David! Our hero! Thanks for the superb piece of work and for sharing it with us! Greatly appreciated! :-)

David,Thanks to the great page you have here, I've slowly started to resurrect my site following a disasterous deletion of 450 category labels during my 2.6 "upgrade"... hoping to know if you, or anyone else, has run into this problem that's jamming me up.In the wp_terms section under phpmyadmin, I only have about 100 of the aforementioned 450 categories there, even though all 450 are present in wp_terms_taxonomy... so I can't relabel anything past 100 in "terms" - any clue what's going on?

Also, who has the current record for most categories on a site? With 450, I have to be up there...

Hi there... saw the notification a couple of days ago that WP 2.6.1 is out and the permalink bug is fixed there. Was waiting a few days before I tried upgrading - just in case 2.6.1 fixed 1 problem but adds another. SEEMS ok so far... so I'm going to upgrade to that. Hope it fixes my blog's permalink problem! Are you upgrading to 2.6.1?

A million thanks for your wonderful walk-through. My hosting provider, to fix a problem at their end, upgraded my blog without telling me they were going to. (I've been in charge of that, mostly, with the ol' Fantastico script.) Had the category problem and your instructions saved my skin.

Now I need to import the "Simple Tags" tags into WP. Hoping the Import feature that handles it works, but that's a problem for another day.

Your Solution is for Problem when Categories go blank, matching the ids, adding description and name manually.but my Problem is, Categories are there but when I open them they lead to 404-Page, where as Post Count is still shown.

I just had the same problem that you already fixed, but when I tried to fix it myself following your steps, i had a problem near the end.

I've already filled the description of all the categories into the database, but when I enter the admin panel of WP, on Manage/Categories there's still no list of them, and when I try to edit the name of every category manually (with the http://your-name/wp-admin/categories.php?action=edit&amp;cat_ID=1), it happens that every ID has already its name, slug and so, but it's still missing from the category list, and of course, not linked to the posts.

I foolishly trusted Network Solutions to do my WP upgrade, thus missed all of the above prior to finding myself in the same category-less place.

Is it true that phpMyAdmin has to be installed on the server's machine? I.e., I cannot just install it myself? I am confused about that, I think I can follow the rest of the directions if I can get phpMyAdmin to run.

I cannot even get phpMyAdmin installed. I am not totally ignorant in web and unix matters, but whenever I try to follow someone's directions to chmod it always leads to a directory locked even to me -- cannot open it or change its permissions or anything. it is deeply frustrating. without phpMyAdmin I think it is impossible to proceed with the above fix, correct?

I am attempting to do an upgrade from 2.2.1 to 2.6.3 via my hosting package (through CPanel and running automatic upgrade process).

The following error message is displayed:

Upgradingâ€¦Initializing Parameters - Done.Warning: system() has been disabled for security reasons in /tmp/cpanel_phpengine.1227518059.34446_2pyHIHir on line 1445Upgrade failedThe database oncall_wrdp1 is not working properly and the creation of a database backup file has failed. Please contact the sysadmin for further assistance. Include this message for reference.The initial installation has not been modified.

I emailed tech support at my hosting company and had the following reply

This is normally caused by a bad install of a script or a damaged database, you need to double check thatthe authors of wordpress have not reported any problems with the upgrade on thier own support forumRegards,

To date, there has been no errors or problems with the preconfigured installation and and I cannot find anything here on the support forum which would answer this problem.

I had also missing link-categories and the same action command did not work for me here. Though I found this site http://neonlabs.structum.net/blog/?p=66 and the advice to ad the names in the <i>wp_terms&gt;&gt;&gt;Here you will add the name and the slug name for each of the categories</i> was very helpful here.

Thank you, I very much have regretted going from Wordpress 2.5 to 2.7 I've had nothing but trouble with podcasts going down, No categories, No tags etc etc. Couldn't find a fix on WP forum anywhere! Stumbled across this in Google tried the SQL query from above and I think its worked. (fingers crossed) Thank you v much.

Thanks. I basically used this with the http://your-site/wp-admin/categories.php?action=edit&amp;cat_ID=1 and kept typing a new number until I found the one that was missing. After I updated the infringing category, it showed up again in the list.

and I'm losing categorys, granted im going thru every page and putting the right name of the band back again, and then sometimes it dissappears like i was on page 11 then i was @ page 8 then I stoped and then boom back to 11??